The self-service industry is constantly seeking ways to increase and improve self-service offerings and to improve customer adoption of self-service products. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/316,037, filed on behalf of NCR Corporation, describes an assisted self-service environment in which customers of a service organization, such as a banking establishment, initiate transactions on self-service terminals and then complete the transactions with teller assistance on teller terminals. This sort of assisted self-service model in the bank branch is one example of situations in which a service establishment and its customers carry out transactions in multiple stages—in this case staging the transaction at one terminal and completing the transaction at another with teller assistance.
These sorts of multi-stage transactions become particularly difficult when tight security is needed to protect valuable information or valuable items, such as in a banking environment where access to the customer's financial accounts is at stake. Conducting these multi-stage transactions typically requires authentication of the customer at each stage of the transaction, or else it requires transferal of authentication from one stage to the next by an authorized employee of the service establishment, to ensure that the proper customer—and only that customer—is granted access to the valuable information. Requiring the customer to present authentication information (such as a bank card and PIN code) at each transaction stage, however, is often frustrating to the customer, and requiring service-establishment employees to verify and transfer each customer's authentication is inefficient and costly.